Data Compression

Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits that should be stored or transmitted and the process is very important in the web hosting field as information located on hard drives is typically compressed to take less space. There are different algorithms for compressing info and they have different efficiency based upon the content. Some of them remove just the redundant bits, so that no data will be lost, while others delete unneeded bits, which results in worse quality once the particular data is uncompressed. This process requires a lot of processing time, therefore a web hosting server has to be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data in real time. An example how binary code may be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five sequential 1s, for example, as an alternative to storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Cloud Hosting

The compression algorithm which we employ on the cloud web hosting platform where your new cloud hosting account will be created is known as LZ4 and it's applied by the revolutionary ZFS file system that powers the system. The algorithm is superior to the ones other file systems work with since its compression ratio is higher and it processes data a lot faster. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed since this happens faster than information can be read from a hard drive. For that reason, LZ4 improves the performance of any site located on a server which uses this algorithm. We take advantage of LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio make it possible for us to generate a number of daily backups of the entire content of all accounts and keep them for a month. Not only do the backup copies take less space, but their generation will not slow the servers down like it often happens with alternative file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The semi-dedicated hosting plans which we supply are created on a powerful cloud platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS works with a compression algorithm called LZ4 that outperforms any other algorithm these days in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed as LZ4 does that much faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk and for that reason, Internet sites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will function faster. We can benefit from the feature although it requires quite a large amount of CPU processing time because our platform uses a wide range of powerful servers working together and we never create accounts on just a single machine like many companies do. There is an additional benefit of using LZ4 - given that it compresses data very well and does that extremely fast, we can also generate several daily backups of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for a month. In this way, you can always recover any content that you delete by mistake.